Hi, I am wondering if it would be more appropriate to remove posts of a transphobic nature from the carnival rather than tacitly condoning them. To tell people to ‘approach with caution’ puts the onus on the person who belongs to the maligned minority to change their behaviour. It does not send the message that Aus & NZ feminism is opposed to transphobia. I was, maybe naively, hoping that it was. If a post had racist content would you promote it anyway, with a trigger warning?

Apologies if this is a downer comment on what is generally a great carnival. I know it takes work to put together – I’ve hosted before. But we must have these conversations. I think maybe our antipodean feminism is lagging behind on trans issues.

This is something we debated among ourselves, and we didn’t really reach a policy, or even a proper conclusion in this specific instance, since we were both at work at the time we were made aware of the content. We debated pulling it versus inserting a warning, and came down in favour of Warn For Now, Reassess At A Better Time. Also, we are both cis, so we’re obviously subject to the limitations of that worldview.

In this instance, our understanding of the post is that, while it discusses transphobia in general, along with debates around transphobic arguments and the best way to deal with people who make them, it does not itself contain transphobia. But that is our understanding, based on the limitations I outlined above. It might be hairsplitting; certainly we were concerned that the post has a strong aura of “I can’t be transphobic because I have links”.

We don’t see a warning as the end of the conversation, and have amended that accordingly.

This has been heavily informed by my personal need for warnings, but I do want the onus placed on me. And that’s sort of what we’ve got from the post.

We’ve changed the warning above to indicate more clearly that No Award disagrees with Greer, but protesting Greer and counter protesting protesting Greer are part of how we expand feminist discourse. We definitely don’t endorse them by linking to them, and we’re sorry we didn’t make that clear.

As for the naivety of antipodean feminism – in some ways that is definitely a problem. But we also constantly want conversations about the ways in which our feminism and needs are different from those of other countries.

ETA: Also, thank you for commenting, and for raising this point, which is a good one.